Since the early 1900s, the Tennant family had raised cattle over rolling hills in the far western reaches of West Virginia, near the Ohio River. But in the late 1980s, Wilbur Earl Tennant's herd began to die off--280 Hereford cows in all. The Tennants suspected it had something to do with the black, odorous water that had begun appearing in the once-pristine Dry Run Creek, from which the cattle drank.
The creek was near a landfill operated by DuPont, which purchased land from ...